Female Agency, Eroticism, and Empowerment in Marie de ...

[Pages:52]Female Agency, Eroticism, and Empowerment in Marie de France's Lai de Lanval Emma Caitlin Briscoe

Thesis submitted to the faculty of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts In English

Charlene Eska Anthony Colaianne

Diana George

May 5, 2015 Blacksburg, Virginia Keywords: agency, empowerment, eroticism, bodytalk, Marie de France, Lanval

Female Agency, Empowerment, and Eroticism in Marie de France's Lanval Emma Caitlin Briscoe ABSTRACT

Since the early fourteenth century, scholars, playwrights and screenplay writers have translated and reinterpreted Marie de France's Lanval. This lai in is the second most frequently translated throughout the medieval era and it continues to be reimagined and retold. All of the translations and reimagined renditions of the Lanval story have in common a strange tonality of otherworldly attraction, unusual gender dynamics, a curious new age aura, and elements of proto-feminism especially in terms of female agency, empowerment and eroticism. While some of these motifs seem to reflect more modern understandings of gender dynamics and conceptualizations of women, a critical analysis of Marie's original text in combination with an exploration of Celtic sources reveals that these motifs were always already present. These elements, stemming from Celtic oral traditions and finding their way across the often unnavigable barriers of time, culture, language, re-adaptation, and genre, establish Marie's Lanval as forever translatable.

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Table of Contents

Dedication ...................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements .........................................................................................................v Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One: Literature Review and Methodology ..........................................................4

Literature Review ........................................................................................................4 Methodology ...............................................................................................................9

Critical Feminist Approaches to Medieval Literature .............................................10 Bodytalk- "a Biology redefined to subvert established hierarchies".......................12 Chapter Two: Marie de France's Lai de Lanval ............................................................. 15 Authorship................................................................................................................. 15 Marie de France's Lais ..............................................................................................18 Marie de France's Lai de Lanval................................................................................20 Lai de Lanval: A Synopsis .........................................................................................22 Chapter Three: Female Agency and Empowerment .......................................................24 The Fairy Woman......................................................................................................24 The Queen.................................................................................................................30 Chapter Four: Eroticism through Bodytalk.....................................................................35 The Fairy Woman......................................................................................................35 The Queen.................................................................................................................39 Bodytalk: The Fairy Woman versus The Queen.........................................................40 Chapter Five: The Translatability of Lanval...................................................................42 Works Cited .................................................................................................................. 44

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Dedication

I cannot see the features right, When on the gloom I strive to paint The face I know; the hues are faint And mix with hollow masks of night; Cloud-towers by ghostly masons wrought,

A gulf that ever shuts and gapes, A hand that points, and pall?d shapes In shadowy thoroughfares of thought; And crowds that stream from yawning doors, And shoals of puckered faces drive;

Dark bulks that tumble half alive, And lazy lengths on boundless shores;

Till all at once beyond the will I hear a wizard music roll,

And through a lattice on the soul Looks thy fair face and makes it still.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, Canto LXX

I dedicate this thesis in memory of my mother, Lincie Ann Barnes Briscoe.

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Acknowledgements

I would first like to acknowledge the members of my thesis committee, Dr. Anthony Colaianne, Dr. Diana George, and Dr. Charlene Eska. I am sincerely grateful for the time each of you took to help me through the composition of this paper. I am particularly indebted to Dr. Colaianne and Dr. George, who were incredibly supportive and made sure to provide positive reinforcement especially during the more challenging portions of this project.

I would also like to acknowledge Dr. Peter Graham and Jen Mooney for valuable guidance and emotional support during the revision phase of this project. They were both able to take some of the anxiety and frustration off of my shoulders and place it precisely where it belonged.

I am forever indebted to Kenna Day, my best friend and partner in crime for half of my undergraduate career and all of my graduate career. Here's to endless nights of hookah, bad fast food, energy drinks, tears, reading the same pages aloud to each other multiple times, and typing and reading through innumerable sunrises together.

I would like to acknowledge Christopher Klein and Mr. Bates, the members of my immediate family. Thank you both for your patience, understanding, and unconditional love.

Finally, I would like to thank my father, John Briscoe, without whom graduate school would have been a complete impossibility on every level imaginable. Thank you for giving me the strength and will to get through this seemingly insurmountable obstacle.

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Introduction

Since the early fourteenth century, scholars, playwrights and screenplay writers have translated and reinterpreted Marie de France's Lanval. Barring Yonec, this lai in particular is the most frequently translated lai throughout the medieval era and it continues to be reimagined and retold to this very day. A Middle English translation of Lanval, entitled Sir Landevale, was composed in the first half of the fourteenth century and served as the primary source of Thomas Chestre's latter fourteenth century rendition, Sir Launfal. Two more reproductions of Marie's lai were composed in the sixteenth century: Bishop Thomas Percy's Sir Lambewell and a fragmentary text containing evidence of Scottish dialect entitled Sir Lamwell. Many years later in the early twentieth century, Thomas Scott Ellis, a British peer and patron of the arts, wrote the script for Lanval: A Drama in Four Acts. The most current reproductions of Marie's Lanval include a 2011 film produced by the Chagford Filmmaking Group entitled Sire Lanval and a series of webcomics written and illustrated by John S. Troutman simply called Lanval.

The primary version of Lanval is an enigmatic tale that requires ample involvement and interpretation on the reader's behalf. The manner in which Marie wrote this tale enables her readers and subsequent re-inventors to gloss, or interpret, the text for themselves. The products of these glossings vary wildly in their treatment of women specifically in terms of agency and eroticism. Each of the aforementioned translations, reproductions, and renditions of the Lanval story have in common a strange tonality of otherworldly attraction, unusual gender dynamics, a curious new age aura, and elements of proto-feminism. While some of these motifs seem to reflect more modern understandings of gender dynamics and conceptualizations of women, a critical analysis of Marie's original text reveals that these motifs were always already present.

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Marie de France's Lai de Lanval is intricately stratified; she subtly weaves this erotic tale of empowered women and subservient men using conventions stemming directly from Breton oral tradition including the fairy mistress, the wealthy dowager, the tabu (injunction), and the offended fairy. This layered quality necessitates a critical feminist examination of her female characters, the mysterious fairy woman and the queen. Ultimately, the goal of this project is threefold: to provide a new feminist critical approach to the fairy woman and the queen in Lanval, to combine the knowledge created in this feminist critique with knowledge about the possible Celtic sources of Marie's conceptualizations and characterizations of women, and to hazard a guess at what makes Lanval, out of all the tales from the medieval era and before, a story that can stretch across time, cultures, and genres.

Chapter one begins with a thorough literature review. The first section lists the various Celtic motifs that Tom Peete Cross observes in Lanval. The second section cites the scholarship of Sharon Kinoshita and Peggy McCracken; their text supplies the great majority of dependable background information on Marie de France, the multilingual and multicultural qualities of twelfth century England, and Lai de Lanval that my critical feminist analysis functions within. The following section denotes the evolution of various methods of critical analysis applied to medieval literature with an emphasis on the relevance of feminist theory to this field within the context of the social positions and textual depictions of women in the middle ages. The subsequent section justifies the application of Walter Benjamin's theories on the mode and purpose of translation. The final section justifies the primary source material used in my analysis.

The latter half of chapter one consists of an explanation of the methodology used to construct the feminist critical frameworks applied to the female characters, their actions, words, and appearances throughout Marie's Lanval. The framework used to analyze female agency and

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empowerment is built upon an intersection of the scholarship of several prominent medieval scholars including Sharon Kinoshita, Jacqueline Eccles, Benjamin Semple, Laurie Finke, and Martin B. Schichtman. Finally, the framework used to analyze eroticism in Lanval , a slightly reimagined approach to E. Jane Burns' bodytalk, is explained alongside a brief exploration of what constitutes the erotic in Old French Romance literature and the medieval era.

Chapter two provides background information on Marie de France in terms of both the authorship of Lanval and her mysterious identity. Background information on Marie's Lais, Lai de Lanval in particular, ensues, followed by a very brief synopsis of the Lanval plot.

Chapter three consists of my analysis the fairy woman and the queen in terms of agency and empowerment based on a feminist critical approach. The Celtic sources of some of these instances of female agency and empowerment are signified and summarized.

Chapter four consists of an analysis of the erotic nature of Marie's depictions of the fairy woman and the queen and their engagement in the act of bodytalk, as well as scholarship suggesting possible Celtic source material. I focus on how Marie's female characters work to dominate male characters using their bodies and beauty. This chapter concludes with a comparison of their methods of engagement in bodytalk.

Chapter five ties my feminist analysis, Cross' identification of Celtic sources, and Walter Benjamin's theories on translatability together in order to determine where these seemingly modern ideas about women and sexuality came from and what enables Marie's Lanval to stand the tests of time, translation, re-adaptation, and linguistic, cultural, and generic barriers and shifts.

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